The visit of Her Majesty The Queen and His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh to the University of Essex
To mark the University’s 40th anniversary, in November 2004, Her Majesty The Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and Head of the Commonwealth. together with His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh visited the University of Essex. The celebrations included a number of demonstrations of University research to Her Majesty The Queen and His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh. Two of the demonstrations were provided by the Intelligent Environments Group (IEG), the first concerned a novel Web-Appliance to enable the then newly emerging Internet-of-Things (then called the Embedded-Internet) to remotely manage everyday living environments. In the demonstration, the Internet-of-Things had been configured to create a phone based remote management system for pet and plant care (this was long before the advent of smart-phones) [1]. Incidentally, this prompted the Duke of Edinburgh to tell a very funny story about his experiences in the USA involving observing someone watering artificial plants – but we shall not disclose more here!). Other people in these pictures include Prof Sir Ivor Crewe (then VC of Essex University) and Dr Jeannette Chin (then completing a PhD on the Internet-of-Things).
The following pictures show the Duke of Edinburgh being briefed by Professor Victor Callaghan about intelligent embedded-agents for autonomous management of smart homes and, rather more hopefully, the concept of smart-palaces. In these pictures is Dr Fayaiz Doctor who, at the time was completing a PhD on Intelligent Environments [2].
[1] Chin J, Callaghan V., ‘Embedded-Internet Devices: A Means of Realising the Pervasive Computing Vision‘, Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2003, ICWI 2003, Algarve Portugal, 2003
[2] Callaghan V, Clark G, Colley M, Hagras H Chin JSY, Doctor F “Intelligent Inhabited Environments”, BT Technology Journal , Vol.22, No.3 . Klywer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Netherlands, July 2004